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A sharp-witted and cultivated young woman, she read widely, particularly in French, at that time the first language of educated Europeans. Whether Peter was the father of Paul and Anna, the two children recorded as their offspring, remains a moot question.Īlthough amorous interests were important in Catherine's personal life, they did not overshadow her intellectual and political interests. Peter was soon unfaithful to Catherine, and after a time she became unfaithful to him. The marriage turned out to be an unhappy one in which there was little evidence of love or even affection. As the Empress had hoped, the two proved amenable to a marriage plan but Catherine later wrote that she was more attracted to the "Crown of Russia," which Peter would eventually wear, than to "his person." When Catherine had met the important condition imposed upon her as a prospective royal consort, that she be converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, she and the young Grand Duke were married in 1745. When Catherine was 15, she went to Russia at the invitation of Empress Elizabeth to meet-and perhaps marry-the heir to the throne, the Grand Duke Peter, an immature and disagreeable youth of 16. Her education emphasized the subjects considered proper for one of her station: religion (Lutheranism), history, French, German, and music. Her reputation as an "enlightened despot," however, is not wholly supported by her deeds.īorn in the German city of Stettin on April 21, 1729, Catherine was the daughter of Prince Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst and Princess Johanna Elizabeth of Holstein-Gottorp. She expanded the Russian Empire, improved administration, and vigorously pursued the policy of Westernization. Rooted in, but going well beyond, provincial affairs, her book challenges us with an entirely new perspective on Russia’s historical trajectory.The Russian empress Catherine II (1729-1796), known as Catherine the Great, reigned from 1762 to 1796. Instead of a defining Russian exceptionalism, we find a world recognizable to any historian of nineteenth-century Europe.ĭrawing on a wide range of Russian social, environmental, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, and synthesizing it with deep archival research of the Nizhnii Novgorod province, Evtuhov overturns a simplistic view of the Russian past. Instead of pervasive ignorance, we are shown a lively cultural scene and an active middle class. Instead of an exclusively centrally administered state, we discover effective and participatory local government. Instead of peasants ground down by poverty and ignorance, we find skilled farmers, talented artisans and craftsmen, and enterprising tradespeople. Through her close study of the province of Nizhnii Novgorod in the nineteenth century, Catherine Evtuhov demonstrates how nearly everything we thought we knew about the dynamics of Russian This book undermines these preconceptions. In short, the sheer immensity of its provincial backwardness could explain almost everything negative about the course of Russian history. And since only despotism could contain these volatile social forces, it followed that the 1917 Revolution was an inevitable explosion resulting from these intolerable contradictions-and so too were the blood-soaked realities of the Soviet regime that came after. Deep and abiding social divisions obstructed the evolution of modernity, as experienced “naturally” in other parts of Europe, so there was no Renaissance or Reformation merely a derivative Enlightenment and only a distorted capitalism. The countryside, home to the overwhelming majority of the nation’s population, was considered a harsh world of cruel landowners and ignorant peasants, and a strong hand was required for such a crude society.Ī number of significant conclusions flowed from this understanding. The responsibility for this lamentable state of affairs was ultimately assigned to the profoundly agrarian character of Russian society. It was commonly assumed that Russia had always labored under a highly centralized and autocratic imperial state. Several stark premises have long prevailed in our approach to Russian history.